The Anatomy of Melancholy

“The wretch denies himself and fears to use it,” Horace says. He has a sickly, dry, pale constitution and cannot sleep for cares and worldly business—his riches, says Solomon, will not let him sleep—and the unnecessary business he heaps upon himself. Or, if he does sleep, it is a very restless, broken, unpleasant sleep, with his moneybags in his arms:

With sacks heaped all around, He falls asleep gaping over them.

And though he is at a banquet or some merry feast, he sighs with grief of heart, as Cyprian says, and cannot sleep even on a bed of down. His sickly body finds no rest: troubled amid abundance and sorrowful amid plenty, unhappy in the present and more unhappy in the life to come, as Basil says.

He is an unending drudge, restless in his thoughts and never satisfied: a slave, a wretch, a worm of the dust. “He is always diligently watching for something to sacrifice to his idol,” Cyprian, preface to the sermons: always seeking a sacrifice to offer his golden god. “By fair means or foul,” he cares not how; his trouble is endless. “Riches grow, yet something is always missing from the diminished estate”: his wealth increases, and the more he has, the more he lacks, like Pharaoh’s lean cattle, which devoured the fat ones and were not satisfied.

Augustine therefore defines covetousness as “a dishonourable and insatiable desire for things of any kind,” a dishonourable and insatiable desire for gain. In one of his letters he compares it to hell, which devours everything and yet never has enough: a bottomless pit, an endless misery, “that reef of avarice upon which cadaverous old men so often run aground.” And what eats away at them most is their continual suspicion, fear and distrust. The covetous man thinks his own wife and children are so many thieves, intent on cheating him, and that his servants are all dishonest.

He cries at once to gods and men to witness That his property is lost and he is ruined, If anything escapes from beneath his roof.

If his doors creak, he cries out straight away: His goods are gone, and he is ruined.

“Timid Plutus,” an old proverb: as fearful as Plutus. So Aristophanes and Lucian portray him, always fearful, pale, anxious, suspicious and trusting nobody. They fear storms for the sake of their grain; they fear their friends, lest they ask something of them, beg or borrow. They fear their enemies, lest they harm them; thieves, lest they rob them. They fear war and fear peace, fear the rich and fear the poor: they fear everyone.